I used ChatGPT to create a Chrome extension in a few minutes

Making a chrome extension was incredibly easy with ChatGPT. Though I have a software development background, I'd never made a Chrome extension before. I had a working Chrome extension in seconds, then 2 days later launched it on the Chrome store.

The use case

A few months back, I saw a comment on X about how the spacing in Notion (popular note-taking software) was too small for readability. I read into it and found that Notion didn't let users configure paragraph spacing . I figured this was a simple enough problem to solve with a Chrome extension, and wanted to see if ChatGPT could help me fix it. Note, I pay for the premium ChatGPT service which (at the time of writing) gives me access to GPT 4.

To my surprise, ChatGPT generated a full .zip file in seconds

I hit up ChatGPT and asked it to create a Chrome extension with this prompt:

Write a chrome extension that increases paragraph spacing in notion

To my surprise, it literally gave me a .zip file. A complete working Chrome extension, in seconds. It told me how to run it, and it actually worked. I couldn't believe it. It was a basic implementation and didn't work in all cases, but still. Mind blown.

Two days of iterating and launch

The initial version from ChatGPT was super simple. It didn't have a working user experience, and only slightly modified the spacing in Notion. It took a few more hours of asking ChatGPT to help add arrows for increasing or decreasing spacing, adding some colors, fixing some edge cases, and we were done.

I had ChatGPT create a quick logo, and submitted the extension to the Chrome store. I won't go into the submitting process here, but if you need help with this, ask our friend ChatGPT.

Here's a link to the final product: Notion Spacer on the Chrome store

And the DALL-E prompt for the logo:

a favicon for a chrome extension that helps control paragraph spacing in notion

Democratized software development?

For anyone who is questioning how much of a difference ChatGPT and other AI tools REALLY make, the answer is huge. Sure, I have a software development background. But I was out of practice and intimidated. Even if AI made it easier for 3% of the population to create software, that's enough to drastically increase the amount of software created.

You may be cynical. You may say, all the hard parts of iterating and testing still had to be done by a human after the initial extension was created. And yes, that's true. However, I made something in two days on a platform I had no experience with, and that I almost certainly wouldn't have made without ChatGPT. Even if I had, it would have taken 3-5 times longer.

There are no indicators that this technology has peaked. What if I could have ChatGPT iterate on the code versus implementing the changes myself with ChatGPT's help?

I believe generative AI will open up software development to a much wider set of the population. Just like Midjourney and DALL-E have already have for art and images.